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The sombre grieving of the traditional funeral service is giving way to celebratory ‘home-going’ services, if reality TV special Best Funeral Ever is any indication.

Photograph by: HOLGER HOLLEMANN
, AFP/Getty Images

With your kind indulgence, a prediction. The dead are about to come alive.

The clues are afoot, and the most persistent one can be found on the daily obituary pages, a foundation of both newspaper advertising and community gossip since our first broadsheet rolled off the press more than a century ago.

No matter how our population grows, or changes, we are somehow compelled to record the passing of our beloveds, and if you pick up this paper any day of the week, it’s evident the practice remains a cultural mainstay.

The art of the obituary is often literary gold, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the written sendoff, so much so that there are best-selling books full of them, but the truth is that tradition has long dictated a formula favouring career accomplishments and fond reminisces from professional peers over the stuff of which lives are lived.

But the obituary — indeed, the business of death — is undergoing something of a revolution. The florid, dignified stories written when the culturally notable die still persist, but the heartfelt family-initiated tributes that now appear in newspapers and on memorial websites are leading an ode-to-joy movement.

Where once the language was perfunctory — name, age, place of date of birth and death, list of grieving relatives, details of service — and held little sense of the person behind the name, today it’s all about the details.

Today, we learn that the dearly departed was an avid snowshoer or a devoted rose grower or spent his/her spare time volunteering at the local pet shelter. Today, we learn how great a daughter, mother, grandmother, friend she was. Today, we know how he died, peacefully or tragically, and how the disease, accident or dysfunction that felled him can best be tackled through donation or informative web links, so that others need not suffer.

Today, photographs of the dearly departed, once unheard of, often show the person in the pursuit of a hobby or in the vibrancy of youth, as if the decrepitude of old age is less a representation of such a profound life passage.

It would be easy to point a finger at the self-indulgent baby boomer for the change, as more and more of our faces are showing up in the death notices, and especially given that we’re a navel-gazing generation insistent on mining and recording every minute milestone (how long before boomers start writing their own obits?), but it may also be that we are becoming a society less afraid of the final frontier.

Which brings us to another clue that life and death are a’changing: Best Funeral Ever.

Those of you not watching the season premiere of Downton Abbey Sunday might have stumbled upon this TLC reality special, which follows the larger-than-life funeral planners working for the Golden Gate Funeral Home in Dallas. The business specializes in African-American “home-going” services.

By way of explanation, owner John Beckwith says: “A home-going service is different from a funeral because it is not always a sad occasion.”

Which is to say, it’s not about the death, it’s about the life, and if that means holding a funeral service in a barn, complete with live pigs on the loose and a barbecue sauce fountain, then so be it. On Sunday’s episode, that’s what provided solace for the grieving family of singer Willie McCoy, who was one of the Drifters and who, later in life, became famous for his rendition of the “baby back ribs” song for the Chili’s restaurant chain.

To celebrate his passing, McCoy’s mourners tucked into a ribfest at communal tables covered in checkered tablecloths, while the man himself was carried into the barn in a metal barrel barbecue toted by chef-hatted pallbearers, followed by a rousing gospel rendition of Go Tell It On The Mountain. Instead of flowers dropped on to a casket, ribs were dipped into the bubbling sauce and fingers were licked clean in McCoy’s memory.

This isn’t your average North American funeral, or funeral parlour, where tissues, hand-wringing and whispered tones are the order of the day, and where How Great Thou Art is about as uplifting as the music gets.

Celebratory funerals are not just the purview of the African-American culture, of course, but North Americans typically treat death with sombre grieving and hushed asides, the occasional laugh elicited by a carefully worded speech at the podium or perhaps a snort of whiskey and a humorous anecdote after the fact.

Sunday’s one-hour special was a TLC test drive, but if all the histrionics and wailing about God’s glory draw an audience — and they surely will — expect the network to add it to its popular reality lineup.

And while the show and its premise may be over-the-top, there was in it an odd dignity and a welcome perspective about recognizing the joy to be found in a person’s life and death.

Or, as one planner put it, when trying to convince the Texas State Fair to allow one family to hold a service there for a man who had died of spina bifida and had never been able to go on a carnival ride: “There’s no morbidity at all. It’s a party.”

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